Idris Returns
by RomanaOrFred
Summary: During a crash, Idris returns, only to find the TARDIS in quite a state. She and the Doctor try to fix the problem which led to Idris reappearing, all while arguing like an old married couple. But how often do opportunities to spend time with your spaceship-turned-humanoid come up?


This one's for Jamie. I started it the night you told me you shipped 11 and Idris.

...

The TARDIS was crashing. This was nothing new. The Doctor had no idea _why_ the TARDIS was crashing, and this was also nothing new. As the floor rocked from side to side and the Doctor's hair displayed remarkable sentience of its own, sparks flew from the console.

"No, no, no, don't do the sparks," he yelled, attempting to sweep his fringe to one side. "I don't have enough eyebrows to risk them burning!"

He flicked switch after switch, peering at the screen with indignation. The TARDIS gave a huge jolt, and the Doctor tripped. It was a graceful fall, the kind that might be added into a ballet by an eccentric choreographer, toes pointed, arms extended. The Doctor was a little resentful that nobody had been there to see it. Amy, he was sure, would have appreciated the legs. She must know a lot about legs. How else would she have been able to grow so MUCH of them?

He lay on his back for a moment, winded. Whatever was happening to the TARDIS, his well-cultivated, expert strategy of 'push some buttons, what's the worst that can happen?' didn't seem to be having much of an effect. In all of the kerfuffle (yes, kerfuffle was a nice word to use, he thought), maybe the best idea was to keep a low centre of gravity.

All of a sudden, the movements of the floor became a little less like a ship in a storm and a bit more like riding a camel would be if camels weren't such angry bastards.

The Doctor leapt back to his feet with all the vigour of a man a hundredth of his age, and stared in confusion at the screen.

"But… we were crashing" he said. "We were definitely… crashing". The screen flickered and went blank with a mournful 'beep'. The lights inside the TARDIS began to dim, slowly but surely. That reassuring whirring sound that resembled someone with a respiratory disease breathing into a megaphone had stopped too. The silence it left behind was eerie.

He hurried over to the door and opened it. Beyond it there was only darkness. "That's probably not a good thing," he thought. Then the TARDIS gave another huge jolt. The Doctor tripped a little less gracefully this time and swore loudly in Gallifreyan.

"Now, now," came a voice from behind him. "That's not polite language to use in front of a lady. Or, for that matter, in front of me."

He turned.

A woman stood next to the console. Her black hair looked a little as though crows had tried to nest in it, but in an incredibly elegant way. There might be things living in it. He made a mental note to keep an eye out for suspicious movements in its depths. Her dress was Victorian and her skin nearly deathly pale.

"Idris?" he whispered, staring at her.

"Doctor. My Doctor," she beamed at him, running forward. She embraced him and lifted him bodily from his feet. He hugged her back.

"But… how are you here? You can't be here! You have to be…" he waved his hand at the console, "in THERE!"

"It almost sounds like you're not pleased to see me," she said, a little resentfully. Then, all of a sudden, she moved forward, grabbed his hand and bit it.

"OW," he yelped. "What was that for?!"

"We did that last time. I thought maybe it might become a tradition. Every time I see you, I bite you."

"Well… don't!" he said. He winced at the pain in his hand. He'd been bitten by dinosaurs less hard than that.

The console room, now in near-complete darkness, gave a shudder, the kind most people give if your remind them that there's a possibility that a spider is hiding inside their clothes. The Doctor had had a lot of fun with that.

"Something pulled me out of it." Idris said.

"Out of what?"

"The TARDIS. It made me feel… what's the word… the feeling you get when someone hits you?" she asked.

"Resignation? Understanding? A pleasant tingling sensation in your right butto- Oh." The Doctor said. "Pain. You mean pain."

"Yes, that one. I felt pain."

She took his hand in her own cold, pale one. "I kept this body stored in my data banks. I've been trying to make a mechanical version, one I could stay in, if I needed to. But-" and at this, she doubled over, hands clasped around her stomach, before continuing "it's not quite right. Not yet. It should work, for a while. I need to find out how to get back into the TARDIS.

"And," she continued. "If I only have a while, or if I have all the time in the universe, you're the one I want to spend it with. My mad Doctor."

He smiled at her, a little tearful, before seeming to gather himself. "Right!" he said, clapping his hands together. "First things first, finding out where we are."

Skipping over to one wall, he nearly tripped over in the darkness. He pulled an impressive lever on the wall, and the lights flickered on, dimmer than before.

"Doctor?" said Idris, uncertainly. He turned to her. "I think… I think it was something happening in here. In the TARDIS. Something… this way!"

She pulled him up some stairs to one of the doors of the console room. Then, before opening it, she spun him round and kissed him. He waved his arms uncertainly for a moment before his brain was alerted to what was happening. He wrapped one arm enthusiastically around her back, and buried the other in her mess of hair, but not too deep. Who knew what was happening in its depths? Then, as quickly as it had started, she pulled away and dragged him through the door and into a long, winding corridor beyond.

"But… you… we-" he paused as she hurried away from him. "Still got it," he muttered to himself with a smug smile, sweeping his hair back before jogging after her.

"You know," Idris said to him as the Doctor caught up to her, "You don't explore inside me nearly as much as you used to."

"That's probably not something you want to say in front of anyone else," he told her.

"Why not? Oh, the nuances of language are baffling. It's so much easier to just…" and she grabbed hold of him again and kissed him again, for longer this time.

He responded, lips moving against hers. Her arms pinned his to his sides (he'd been held by tentacles that held him less hard than her) and he leaned forward slightly, trying to stop her from drawing away from him as she began to move.

She stared into his eyes, took hold of his hand in hers. The universe was indeed vast, but sometimes she marvelled at how it held nothing when compared to what was inside those who _lived_.

She mentally shook herself (in her normal TARDIS form, this would have manifested as an interesting beeping noise that would slightly worry the Doctor until he saw something sparkly and got distracted) and turned away from him, back up the corridor.

"So what do you think went wrong? Where are we, anyway?" asked the Doctor.

"We've stopped moving. Through time and space." She said. "I think it's a built-in defence mechanism. Something went wrong inside the TARDIS, so it stopped everything outside."

"You can DO that?"

"You never read the manual, did you? I can do all kinds of things! Travel through time and space, cultivate entire ecosystems inside to operate different aspects of travel, assimilate information from every place we go through, and I have a very good coffee machine attached to the console."

He recalled the TARDIS manual with slight horror. It had been as nearly as tall as him and far, far more intimidating. And worst of all, what with Gallifreyan technology, it was probably even bigger on the inside. He had things to do that weren't reading technical language, things like eating meringues and running lots and disrupting the flow of history and trying to find out if anyone in history had ever found a way to stop farts smelling.

Idris pushed open a door to one side of the seemingly neverending corridor. The room on the other side was covered in clocks. Grandfather clocks, cheap kitchen clocks, glass clocks with cogs whirring. One alien clock was formed of flowers which bloomed at different intervals, telling the time that way. The ticking in the room was almost unbearably loud, with hundreds of clock hands adding to the noise.

Idris crossed to the other side of the room, opening a door covered in clocks that seemed to change colour every second, and pulled the Doctor through it by the arm.

The next room… the Doctor stared around. It was huge, no ceiling or walls in sight except for the one behind them. The light must have been artificial, but it shone off the most beautiful jungle the Doctor had ever seen. Trees, shrubs, grasses, with what must have been every variation on chlorophyll the universe had come up with colouring their leaves all the colours on the spectrum. Leaves with patterns, with differently coloured veins, trees with bark as smooth as a mirror, transparent trunks, grass with blades as delicate as glass… the Doctor gazed with awe. He could nearly feel his hair wiggle in excitement. (He made a mental note that next time he regenerated, he should have the ability to move his hair. He could have angry hair. ATTACK hair. Then again, it could be quite difficult to focus when regenerating…)

"This place is incredible!" he said. "How come I've never been in here before?"

"Oh, I think it's normally a bit further from the console room," Idris responded idly, beginning to pick her way through the outer trees.

"But there must be a whole… ecosystem in here! Do you have any armadillos? I LOVE armadillos."

Idris shushed him and tugged him into the forest. "This forest regulates…" she waved her arms helplessly. "I don't know the word! It regulates things. All TARDISes have them. You wouldn't believe how much data can be stored in one organism, let alone a forest. There are species that have developed in these which feed off time, and which evolved in the forests of spaceships. Also," she said, "they're pretty."

"They would be. They're a part of you," the Doctor murmured behind her.

He tapped a tree to one side and said, "Nice shade of purple."

She stared at the tree, then back at him. "That's not purple. That's blue."

"It's purple! Plainly! Look!" he rapped on the trunk.

"Hit the trunk all you like, it's not going to change the colour!" she said, before spinning on her heel and striding away, muttering, "purple. Next you'll be telling me _I'm_ purple."

He jogged inelegantly after her, muttering about how she didn't even know what _gravy_ was, so how would she know what the different colours were called?

They continued in near silence, moving deeper and deeper into the trees. At some point, the Doctor gently took hold of Idris's hand, and she looked back at him smiling, clasping it in both of her own before they carried on. With a millennium together not much more needed to be said. Hand in hand they strode through the forest, occasionally stopping to peck each other on the cheek or embrace, Idris on tiptoe to reach the Doctor's cheek. Physical opportunities between yourself and your time-travelling space ship in human form didn't happen all too often and, should the reader ever find themselves in such a situation, they are encouraged to make the most of it.

After several minutes of this, Idris looked ahead and stopped, with a quiet gasp. Ahead of them was a sudden change in the scenery. The trees in front of them were grey, colourless, a stark contrast to the vibrant plants behind.

"Right, I suppose that would be what's wrong?" said the Doctor. "That can't be good."

"Even after a thousand years your ability to state the obvious astounds me," said Idris drily.

She stepped into the clearing a little apprehensively, staring up at the grey trees. The Doctor followed her, pulling his sonic screwdriver from his pocket with what was, in his opinion and his opinion only, a certain amount of pizazz. Its buzzing sounded much clearer in the silence of the forest.

He peered closely at the reading on the side, and said "They're infected. Some kind of…" he squinted, "fungal spore? Must've blown in through the TARDIS doors sometime when the shields were down and made its way in here."

There was a sudden, loud creaking noise. A crack. The noise of splintering. The Doctor turned. A tree, grey and ill, was toppling. It seemed to be going in slow motion, but his limbs wouldn't obey him. They wouldn't move as fast as he needed to. He yelled, without hearing himself, as the tree reached 45 degrees from the ground, 30, 15…

It landed with a huge crashing noise, in the very spot Idris had been standing just moments before. His limbs, now as much under his control as they ever were, began to move at what felt like their proper speed again as he jumped over the trunk, tripping over sticks in his haste.

Idris was lying on the ground, legs and hips covered by the trunk. Her head was slightly to one side, eyes closed, her breathing fast as he bent over her.

"Idris? Idris!" he said, quietly at first, then louder. Her eyes fluttered open, and she gazed up at him. "Sorry, the pain response was… quite unbearable."

He stood up straight quickly, and leant against the tree trunk, putting all his weight against the grey bark, but to no avail. He strained, groaned, his shoulder against it, before he kicked it angrily. It still didn't move.

He knelt down beside Idris again, cupping her face in his hand. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I can't move it."

She nodded, wincing a little. "I'm sorry, Doctor," she said. "However long this body was going to give me, it was never going to be long enough. Not with you. I have all of time and space, and for you it was never enough. But if you can help the forest, it should mean I can return."

He attempted a smile, his eyes damp. "I've lost so many. I could never lose you. Universes couldn't keep us apart."

He turned away, drying his eyes on his sleeve, and peered at the sonic screwdriver. "In theory, if I can find the right frequency, I can disrupt the spores. Destroy them inside the trees. It should cure them, and quickly. I don't know how long it will take them to recover. Seconds or minutes or days."

He zapped the sonic screwdriver at the fallen tree, measuring… well, something about the spores.

Then he held it up in the air, with a little less majesty than he had hoped for, and buzzed it for several seconds.

"You know," said Idris, gasping a little with the pain of talking as he sat down cross-legged beside her head, "you might fool your strays into thinking you know what you're doing, but you never fooled me. For one thing, you never pulled on _their_ coffee lever instead of the handbrake. Although I think the coffee lever might be called something else on humans. And only some of them have them. And it doesn't make coffee. Strange organisms."

The Doctor laughed a little before the gravity of the situation returned to him. He turned back to her prone form, so fragile beneath the fallen trunk. "You know," he said, his voice cracking a little, "We make a great team. You and me. The entire cosmos. We've been to the end of time together and here we are." He leant down and pressed his lips gently against hers, his hand cupping her neck. A tear fell from his eye straight onto her cheek, but she didn't pull away. She moved her hand to his cheek and swept it away. Her lips moved a little against his, and he could feel the warmth leeching out of them slowly.

He pulled his lips away but continued supporting her head with his hand as he rested his forehead against hers, eyes closed. They remained like that for a minute or so, Idris's breathing shallow and rapid, the Doctor's slow.

Idris opened her eyes, looking around as best she could. "Doctor," she whispered. "The colour is coming back."

The two of them looked away from each other, the Doctor's hand still supporting Idris's head and hers still at his face, as the grey of the trees began to lighten. They turned to a murky brown before the different trees deviated from each other. Reds, blues, greens, purples and yellows surrounded them now, bathing them in light.

He felt Idris's body relax as she whispered "I can feel… I can go back now." Then she looked back up at him. "My Doctor. You won't ever lose me. We'll meet again like this, you and me."

Her body went limp, and as the rays of light shone down on it, particles of it began to coalesce into a stream moving upwards, through the leaf canopy and beyond the Doctor's field of vision. The body deteriorated into nothing, where only moments before he had held her. Idris had returned to the TARDIS.

He walked slowly back to the console room, the journey feeling much longer without her companionship. Twigs snapped (or, in many cases, made odd noises or turned to liquid) at the pressure of his feet, but he didn't notice. He barely took into account the room full of clocks, and he moved back down the corridor to the TARDIS doors without looking up from his reverie. He swung them open and looked outside. The view had returned, as though nothing had changed. The rest of the universe carried on. He rested his head against the door of the TARDIS, still open. A faint whirring noise came from behind him.

"My TARDIS," he whispered.


End file.
